This Friday we'll have two talks followed by drinks.

16:00 Diego Ceccarelli (Bloomberg London): Learning to Rank: From theory to production

Learning to Rank is awesome. Even more awesome is the fact that Apache Solr/Lucene is the first open source search engine that can do it out of the box. But all that is for nought if you don't hunt down the necessary features, make it inter-operate with all the other functionality, and do this fast enough on a production system for such ranking to be feasible.
This talk, by one of the engineers at Bloomberg who built this functionality into Solr in the first place, is a war story of how the company's real-time, low-latency news search engine was tamed to learn how to rank. Join us on a journey that will teach you how to take your LtR system to your clients, and more importantly, the many ways not to do it. There will be drama, excitement, and despair (and even Gandalf, if you pay attention)! Now grab that popcorn...